MANTECA: Ritmo y Sabor LP
Reynaldo
6,054 Posts
I've only heard the "Afro Funky" track, which is all right I guess, even though funky is dead, but how is the rest of the album? Does it have more of a latin feel?
Comments
rest of the album is straight up salsa - bass, percusion and a faint hint of an electric piano on a few tracks. think they forgot to mic it and you can just hear it bleeding through the timbal mic. ghetto latin audio engineering.
Manteca, as I understand, is lard. There must be another meaning, no?
You can hear Gillespie saying "I'll never go back to Georgia" at the head of his "Manteca." What does Manteca have to do with Georgia and what does Georgia have to do with lard?
I am lost. Please send up a flare.
Grease, flavor etc. Doesn't Dizzy have a song called 'I'll Never Go Back To Georgia' that Joe Cuba lifted and turned into 'El Pito'???
Manteca is slang for heroin, at least in PR. I don't know if this is the context it is used in this song or by this group, as I haven't heard them.
What I've heard about "El Pito," which was written by Jimmy Sabater, Joe Cuba's singer for a while, is that while they were touring down south, they were stopped by racist pigs in Georgia. Something happened during a routine traffic stop, the band was given hell by the cops and put in lock up for a few days. I don't think heroin was involved though.
Really? Somewhere--maybe Juan Flores' essay on boogaloo--I think I remember Sabater laughing over the fact that he'd never even been to Georgia at that time and saying that they'd cribbed the phrase from Dizzy. I could be completely imagining this, though, and I don't doubt that the other story is also circulating.
That actually sounds more plausible, I mean, why would Joe Cuba be touring the south? Maybe the story was adopeted too, and it was Dizzy who was thrown in jail not the Sextet. I was told the story by a friend who heard it from his professor at some latin music history class at Columbia.
Yeah, I'm not sure that there would have been enough people clamoring to see Joe Cuba in the south at the time to make a tour economically worth his while.
This is from www.salsa.com:
Have you never eaten at Waffle House, son?